"Quake is in the DNA of DreamHack, it exists both in its past and future. And as we head towards this fall, it’s time to get ready for the Quake Champions action to kick off in a huge way. In this case, that’s to the tune of $75,000 at DreamHack Denver and $350,000 awaiting you at DreamHack Winter. With the time ticking down to DreamHack Denver already, we’re ready now to get ready for our qualifiers. They start already on September 23rd so get ready to compete in our open qualifiers.

Each open qualifier will be double elimination, with a broadcast live from our studio in Stockholm, bringing you the action from the final qualifying matches. Most play days will include action in two regions starting within hours of each other, with our studio bringing you the exciting conclusion to each back to back."

-16 players – 8 invites, 8 qualifiers (4 North America, 4 Europe)
-Group stage into 8 man single elimination bracket
-Invited players will be placed randomly into groups occupying the top two seeds in each group. Qualified players will be randomly seeded into the four groups.

-24 players – 8 invites, 14 online qualifiers (4 Europe, 4 North America, 2 South America, 2 CIS, 2 Australia-New Zealand), 2 BYOC on-site qualifiers
-Upon completion of all qualifiers, all qualifiers & invited players will be ranked to seed the group stage
-Group stage will consist of 6 groups of 4. Top 2 competitors will qualify into 12 man single elimination bracket. The top 4 players from the group consisting of match and round record will get a bye into the first stage of the single elimination bracket.

Sacrifice info:

-12 teams – 2 invites, 7 online qualifiers (2 Europe, 2 North America, 1 South America, 1 CIS, 1 Australia-New Zealand), 3 BYOC on-site qualifiers
-Upon completion of all qualifiers, all qualifiers & invited players will be ranked to seed the group stage
-3 team group stages with top team advancing to a 4 team single elimination bracket playoff.

If you ask me things like this are killing the quake scene. 2 or 4 spots from all of europe for the only tournaments? If you are good, but you know you wont qualify, or if u dont qualify - why should you keep playing when there is such low chance of actually qualifying?

I am not saying i want europe to have more spots. I am saying i want more spots for EVERYONE in the tournament. They wanted sacrifice to be their e-sport game. Well, the teams/players that didnt qualify for tournaments basicly just stopped playing quake instead.

16 players for a duel tournament and 4 teams for sacrifice aint enough to make Quake a big game.

They've made some baffling decisions but this could be part of a larger rollout, where it would then make sense. With the game still having technical issues, and still in early access, all the 2017 events might just be trial runs. Maybe.

From what i've seen, allowing only 4 attendees from europe to qualify is NUTS.

It should be 32 and at least 8 spots for eu.

The competition here is level above the rest respectable parts of the world.

Each and every one eu qual to QCON was grand-final quality. And so many great players were not allowed to go. While the NA quals frankly saying were merely watchable at all - i cba to watch anything except rapha-gelle.

And now same shit again. We wont see at least 10 decent eu players, while having to watch 4 mediocre at best na guys dropping in the first two rounds.

The other angle is that they're artificially making the scene too old-schoolish, by giving 5 eu direct invites to the old dogs, while the new blood will fight with the other old monsters like tox, noctis, fazz, stermy, killsen, spartie, strenx, etc... and only for the 4 spots! So its guaranteed that there will be more old players than the new ones.

Not that i'm against direct invites - its the right thing to do - but with all the numbers in mind now its kinda disproportional.

Ever heard of sponsors ?
What do you think they care most about ?
Giving money to tier 2 players from USA but getting less exposure because of it or sponsoring a tournament with the best players in the world (and probably players from the biggest playerpool too AKA europe) ?

The only argument you can make is when a tournament is hosted in a certain region/country they like to have representatives from that given region/country for the spectators physically present at the event but it's certainly not required to have perfect balance of region representatives

They literally don't give a fuck who gets the money, they only care that people watch and buy their product

ID/BETHESDA obviously want the game to be big in the USA, they know they have a much lower chance of achieving this if America knows it has no chance of winning any money. Which they don't if they did this based on talent and merit.

So what use is pushing hundreds of thousands into prize money to generate buzz if America realizes its has no chance of winning?

guess what, they won't care, so they will not be effective with their budget.

The only way they could give hope to Americans, was to firewall them.

Hence my comment. So no, its not the only argument I can make, its just the only one your small brain can think of.

So by giving extra spots to bad american players they actually make USA win ?

Look at results of last quakecon (or any Q3/QL tournament before), USA has always been dominated regardless of the amount of players they sent.
It actually makes them look worse than if they had just sent their top 2/3 players
So what's your point genius ?

And making the bigger playerpool (EU) angry by doing favours to the USA pool is actually a smart marketing move ?

Not to mention the fact that you seem to think that the money poured in those tournaments comes from ID/Bethesda only and thus completely ignoring sponsors...

we had a $15k Dreamhack Winter tournaments for QL in 2013 that featured 32 players playing there with no real restriction as to where you came from, so it still featured aussies and NA and what not.

And now for QC and a $350k tournament it somehow shrunk down to a 24 players tournament with another (after QWC and even Denver) huge unfair disproportional amount of spots between regions. That's kinda sad.

I really don't see why I should even bother starting to care about DUEL now. I've tried but with the amount of focus I need to put on sacrifice and the number of talent EU players in DUEL I don't really get the incentive to play in both. I've seen above that spart1e essentially agrees that this is nonsense.

Tournament organizers and id soft should start to realize the EU scene and CIS (Russia) are the regions that kept Quake alive for all but the past decade and maybe more. I'd hoped QWC had demonstrated that once and for all.

Why the heck isn't it the two QWC finalists in Sacrifice making the 2 invites ? As far as I know in other esports games like CSGO or LoL or w/e the invites are based upon performance of any team, not some arbitrary mix of performance and 'but we need more diversity in regions' bullshit. (EDIT : unless notofast is disbanding ?)

EDIT : I believe I need to point out that I'm indeed grateful for this tournament even taking place. And also for giving a proper chance for other regions like SA and AUS/NZ. As I've been saying in previous threads on ESR before, I choose to have faith in QC and the devs behind the game and want to thank them for what it's bringing us Quake passionates. Still that does not mean that we can also ignore the fact that some decisions are debatable.

Its not about EU not having enough of spots. Its about a new game trying to get big. But they are making wrong choices by going max players 16 for a big tournament or 4 teams for sacrifice.

There is no point for people to play sacrifice. And making it kinda impossible for even the top players to qualify, why should the rest of players even keep playing quake?

EDIT: I really do believe that sacrifice COULD get bigger if they just allow more teams to play in the tournaments. Its rather easy to get really good mixx vs mixx sacrifice games of high caliber now, but the player amount is really limited cuz people dont care about the Gamemode when they cant even play the tournaments, I mean, why should they even try when we already have 2 teams with the roster of 4 superstars in both teams? (eu)

There's more talent in EU than anywhere else, and I do agree that they need more spots into tournaments. As I said, a small 15k QL tournament for a dying game with no future back in 2013 had MORE SPOTS than this 350k tournament for a game that wants to firmly puts its foot into the esports landscape and is looking towards the future.

It doesn't make any sense to me. But what makes this worse is the region limitations. I mean I kind of agree with it so you can support all scenes around the world, but if you do that you need to acknowledge the fact certain scenes have a (much) larger pool of talented players and hand out properly thought out spots in proportion to those scenes.

In all fairness, dahang and rapha deserve the invites, and then mayyybe one more spot for NA or two (and it's already a stretch).

Remember QWC didn't even have cypher or agent and it was 12 players from eu in the top16. Ridiculous.

As for Sacrifice it's the same thing, if there's gonna be 12 teams with 5 regions involved, you need atleast 4 EU teams if not 5 or 6. Ideally though it should have been 16 teams atleast.

I don't get why they don't do it oldschool style and just allow everyone to part take in the tourney.
You can then offer prizes for online tournaments regarding seeding / travel expenses etc.
I remember several lans near the year 2000 which had room for 512 attendees (Q3) which were even filled just with the benelux + some german players.

Cool to see dreamhack picking up quake again, but like others have pointed out not enough slots (especially for EU if im being honest, but also overall).

Wish they could make it more players overall and run two streams simultaneously. Dunno, maybe there just arent enough hotel rooms available in jönköping or something lol, it's completely booked everytime.

When the scene is young I feel like you'd wanna have many slots for many players to try to make a name and establish them selves, get people grinding and get orgs to pick up players and get them paid to play full time. I'm not really aware of how much it costs to fly a player there and get a room for him but I'd rather see a little smaller prize pool but a 32 slot tourny :)

Lets face it, out of the top 32 of the world at least 28 are Europeans.

In my case id's policy benefits me since I actually have chances of getting a top1 or 2 spot in South America, despite losing to whaz online all the time. An undeserved free trip to Sweden.

I hope I manage to beat the Brazilians on their own horrible server, where they get 10 ping and the rest of the continent gets from 50 (Argentinians) to 90 (Chile), as Brazil has been having routing issues for like a year, plus a 5 seconds timeout that happens once or twice every match to all people outside BR. Id couldn't have chosen a worse location and provider for the continent. But at the same time, the horrible server is the very reason why the best players of the continent haven't been playing QC much at all, and so why I have a chance (flesh1, mesita, doomsday).

The only company that is doing a good job with Esports is Valve imo (just look at CS:GO and Dota2)

Then you have Psyonix (Rocket League) who tries to copy Valve as much as they can because they realised that they do pretty much everything right

And then you have clowns like Blizzard (with Hearthstone) who think giving a chance to everyone in a game with huge variance and ending up with unknowns in big tournaments is more important than inviting famous good players that spectators actually want to see. (And all that while having their game so unbalanced you want to slit your wrists)

And finally you have the king of retardness, namely ID Software, who could look and learn from all the aforementioned companies but still manage to fuck up on every single level :
- Pouring money in a mod that is unwatchable
- Completely clueless about repartition of skills between each region (or worse, ignoring it)
- Making the worst seedings possible
- "Balancing" their game a few days before a major tournament

It's just really sad to see how bad they are while it's actually so easy to make it right

I dunno about Riot Games (because fuck dota copycat for braindeads) or the CoD, etc scenes (because fuck consoles)

Good that Aus got a spot or 2, however I would like to see a bigger tournament, in quake live a small tournament is okay because let's face it the 32nd best player in the world is a world away from the top 5-6 or whatever, but in qc that's not the case so much, so even a 64 man tournament or something would be good, you don't need to have every participant paid for by the company which I dare say is why it's a small event. Also I like to see a bigger representation from where the tournament is, so in this case a bigger eu feel would be good. I only glanced at the tournament schedule but was it groups of 3 for the sacrifice with only one team going through? If that's the case then if I don't make the duel comp I highly doubt I would wanna travel for 25 hours to be in eu for a couple of days and play a couple matches of sac most likely matches against some form
Of stacked team able to play 5 hours a day haha should try to get as many comp games as possible as the game is only in its infancy. I read up there spartie saying there is no point playing if you can't qualify- if that was the case do you think that scenes such as ours would even exist? I have never played this game or any game for money and to be able to compete, I played because it was fun. In fact I would go so far as to say I don't even like playing at competitions.

Unless of course you don't actually find the game fun in which case I would suggest finding a new game (this was why prior to quake con I didn't play at all, and only rly went to quake con to see what the game felt like on a playable ping without as much stutter as our only server has.)

Too many spots for NA, and really, invintations kill all the motivation for new players.

I don't know what zero4 is doing. Either he is not given any real responsibility, or he just fails at his job (which is more likely given what we know about pro players communications with him). Anyway, I don't understand how id software manages to fail even at their best opportunities.

Invitations are actually important and it's the only good thing they have done so far

They weaken the qualifiers which is good for new players.
It obviously also removes open spots in the actual tournament but I think it's important for sponsors (and for the entertainment in general) to have a guarantee that big/famous players will be present as spectators usually enjoy watching them.
It also creates an objective/incentive for players to become consistently good enough to get invited in turn (a sort of prestigious status you have to earn)

Just look at the 2 biggest games in esports (dota2 and CS), they always invite teams to pretty much any event (whether it's a major or a smaller one)

welcome to modern "esports" (where esports is just a marketing scheme) :)

the competitive games with lasting power were created by fluke, almost every single one
after that, companies tried to capitalize on these scenes with subpar sequels and attaching "esports ready" buzzwords and attractive prize pools to migrate the players

It still amazes me idsoftware have not run FFA tourneys.
Its by far the most obvious way to get people into the game.

8 players per game.
No team based logistics.
Quad every two mins which can give noobs a fighting chance.
A simple game plan which can be explained to specs and players in seconds.
Its quite fun and spectator friendly.
It allows the game to be played over a wider geographic area.

Yes , and try and keep the pro`s away , because beeing asswhopped in a new game isnt fun. You can quickly get the feeling that the pro`s do it just because the love to punish the weaker cuz theyr assholes.

FFA can level the battlefield so to speak -- for example, Jamerio does really well in FFAs no matter who's on the server. There's a less predictable set of changing circumstances during an FFA that makes the frag tally winner more of a mystery.